Essex

Essex

Nikolaus Pevsner’s introduction to his Buildings of England volume
for Essex made it clear that he considered the county tainted by
association. Who, he wondered in 1954, would ever want to go ‘touring
and sightseeing’ there, after experiencing the ‘squalor of Liverpool
Street Station’, its horror compounded by the ‘suicidal waiting room
on platform nine’? His hatred, oddly, even extended to ‘the cavernous
left-luggage counters behind platforms nine and ten’. Pevsner died
thirty years later, but still too soon to see the dreary old station
transformed or to be aware that an insignificant former USAF base
would become London’s third airport, crowned by a sensationally
elegant terminal, representing just the kind of marriage of function
and beauty he most admired.